So, if you make less that $40,000 a year and find the high cost of Obamacare to be overwhelming, President Obama has a message for you: cancel your stupid cable TV and iPhone service you ingrates. Then you will be able to afford my mandated-by-law take over of our national healthcare system.

This is what Obama told a Latino audience at a townhall held this week on several Spanish language media networks.

Obama was presented with a question about a family that makes $36,000 a year and found that the cheapest Obamacare plan they could find would cost them $315 a month. This, the family felt, was too expensive and something they could not afford.

The President’s response was chilling. Obama said, “if you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill… it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care.”

WATCH:

So, he expects people to cancel their phones and TV to be able to afford his mandated, fiat healthcare charges?

I am sure President Obama has some pretty decent cable and phone service, but I am afraid I can’t relate. I have minimum cell service and a minimum cable TV package and both bills together don’t get close to the $315 a month that the healthcare above would cost.

And Ed Morrissey of HotAir shows us how — even if the “catastrophe” scenario Obama laid out happened — it would still be cheaper to NOT have ObamaCare, and simply pay out of pocket. AND Ed also includes what Obama failed to: the high cost of ObamaCare’s deductibles!

Let’s take a look at that $300 a month, too. Assuming that we’re talking about a family of four, that would force the family to spend $3,600 a year. While that might be money well spent in the case of catastrophe, it’s a bad investment on several levels otherwise. If both kids break a bone, it might run them $500 each to get treated, or perhaps even a thousand each if they go to an emergency room. If they get the flu, perhaps another $200 each for a doctor visit. Throw in wellness checks for everyone at $250 each, and we’re talking about $3400 in medical care, $200 less than their premiums.

But wait! In most plans of that cost, the family will have to spend thousands of dollars in deductibles first for everything but the wellness checks — so the only benefit will be covering the $1000 those cost. In this example, the family that normally would have spent $3400 out of pocket in that year will now spend $5,800.

That’s why families such as the caller’s used HSAs to spend pre-tax money on routine care and smaller emergencies, and chose so-called catastrophic insurance to deal with serious issues requiring hospitalizations. They could do that and still afford to have a phone and cable TV, at least until Barack Obama assumed he could prioritize their budgets better than they could.